Practical Essays Part 3

The Relativity of Pleasures, although admitted in many individual cases, has often been misconceived. The view is sometimes expressed, that there can be no pleasure without a previous pain; but this goes beyond the exigencies of the principle. We cannot go on for ever with any delight; but mere remission, without any counterpart pain, is enough for our entering with zest on many of our pleasures. A healthy man enjoys his meals without any sensible previous pain of hunger. We do not need to have been miserable for some time as a preparation for the reading of a new poem. It is true that if the sense of privation has been acute, the pleasure is proportionally increased; and that few pleasures of any great intensity grow up from indifference: still, remission and alternation may give a zest for enjoyment without any consciousness of pain.

The principle of Comparison is capriciously made use of by Paley, in his account of the elements of Happiness. He applies it forcibly and felicitously to depreciate certain pleasures--as greatness, rank, and station--and withholds its application from the pleasures that he more particularly countenances,--namely, the social affections, the exercise of the faculties, and health.

[SIMPLICITY OF STYLE A RELATIVE MERIT.]

The great praise often accorded to Simplicity of Style, in literature, is an example of the suppression of the correlative in a case of mutual relationship. Simplicity is not an absolute merit; it is frequently a merit by correlation. Thus, if a certain subject has never been treated except in abstruse and difficult terminology, a man of surpa.s.sing literary powers, setting it forth in homely and intelligible language, produces a work whose highest praise is expressed by Simplicity. Again, after the last century period of artificial, complex, and highly-wrought composition, the reaction of Cowper and Wordsworth in favour of simplicity was an agreeable and refreshing change, and was in great part acceptable because of the change. It does not appear that Wordsworth comprehended this obvious fact; to him, a simplicity that cost nothing to the composer, and brought no novelty to the reader, had still a transcendent merit.

It has been a frequent practice of late years to celebrate the praises of Knowledge. Many eloquent speakers have dilated on the happiness and the superiority of the enlightened and the cultivated man. Now, the correlative or obverse must be equally true: there must be a corresponding degradation and disqualification attaching to ignorance and the want of instruction. This correlative and equally cogent statement is suppressed on certain occasions, and by persons that would not demur to the praises of knowledge: as, when we are told of the native good sense, the untaught sagacity, the admirable instincts of the people,--that is, of the ignorant or the uneducated. Hence the great value of the expository device of following up every principle with its, counter-statement, the matter denied when the principle is affirmed. If knowledge is a thing superlatively good, ignorance--the opposite of knowledge--is a thing superlatively bad. There is no middle standing ground.

In the way that people use the argument from Authority, there is often an unfelt contradiction from not adverting to the correlative implication. If I lay stress upon some one's authority as lending weight to my opinion, I ought to be equally moved in the opposite direction when the same authority is against me. The common case, however, is to make a great flourish when the authority is one way, and to ignore it when it is the other way. This is especially the fashion in dealing with the ancient philosophers. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are quoted with much complacency when they chime in with a modern view; but, in points where they contradict our cherished sentiments, we treat them with a kind of pity as half-informed pagans. It is not seen that men liable to such gross errors as they are alleged to have committed--say on Ethics--are by that fact deprived of all weight in allied subjects, as, for example, Politics--in which Aristotle is still quoted as an authority.

[DIGNITY OF ALL LABOUR ABSURD.]

Many of the sins against Relativity can be traced to rhetorical exaggeration. Some remarkable instances of this can be cited.

When a system of ranks and dignities has once been established, there are a.s.sociations of dignity and of indignity with different conditions and occupations. It is more dignified to serve in the army than to engage in trade; to be a surgeon is more honourable than to be a watchmaker. In this state of things a fervid rhetorician, eager to redress the inequalities of mankind, starts forth to preach the dignity of _all_ labour. The device is a self-contradiction. Make all labour alike dignified, and nothing is dignified; you simply abolish dignity by depriving it of the contrast that it subsists upon.

Pope's lines--

Honour and shame from no condition rise; Act well your part; there all the honour lies--

cannot be exempted from the fallacy of self-contradiction. Differences of condition are made by differences in the degree of honour thereto attached. If every man that did his work well were put on a level, in point of honour, with every other man that did the same; if the gatekeeper of a mansion, by being unfailingly punctual in opening the gate, were to be equally honoured with a great leader of the House of Commons, then, indeed, equality of pay would be the only thing wanted to abolish all differences of condition. There is, no doubt, in society, a quant.i.ty of misplaced honour; but so long as there are employments exceptionally arduous, and virtues signally beneficent in their operation, honour is a legitimate spur and reward, and should be graduated according to the desert in each case.

In spurring the ardour of youth to studious exertion, it is common to repeat the Homeric maxim, "to supplant every one else, and stand out first". The stimulating effect is undoubted; it is strong rhetorical brandy. Yet only one man can be first, and the exhortation is given simultaneously to a thousand.[5]

[JUSTICE ADMIRABLE ONLY IF RECIPROCATED.]

In the discussion and inculcation of the moral duties and virtues, there has been, in all ages, a tendency to suppress correlative facts, and to affirm unconditionally what is true only with a condition. Thus, the admirable nature of Justice, and the happiness of the Just man, are a proper theme to be extolled with all the power of eloquence. It has been so with every civilized people, pagan as well as Christian. In the dialogues of Plato, justice is a prominent subject, and is adorned with the full splendour of his genius. Aristotle, in one of the few moments when he rises to poetry, p.r.o.nounces justice "greater than the evening-star or the morning-star". Now all this panegyric is admissible only on the supposition of _reciprocal_ justice. Plato, indeed, had the hardihood to say that the just man is happy in himself, and by reason of his justice, even although others are unjust to him; but the position is untenable. A man is happy in his justice if it procure for him justice in return; as a citizen is happy in his civil obedience, if it gain him protection in return. There are two parties in the case, and the moralist should obtain access to both; he should induce the one to fulfil his share before promising to the other the happiness of justice and obedience. It may be rhetorical, but it is not true, that justice will make a man happy in a society where it is not reciprocated.

Justice, in these circ.u.mstances, is highly n.o.ble, praiseworthy, virtuous; but the applying of these lofty compliments is the proof that it does not bring happiness, and is an attempt to compensate the deficiency. There is a certain tendency, not very great as human nature is const.i.tuted, for justice to beget justice in return--for social virtue on one side to procure it on the other side. This is a certain encouragement to each man to perform his own part, in hope that the other party concerned may do the same. Still, the reciprocity occasionally fails, and with that the benefits to the just agent. It is necessary to urge strongly upon individuals, to impress upon the young, the necessity of performing their duty to society; it is equally implied, and equally indispensable, that society should perform its part to them. The suppressing of the correlative obligation of the State to the individual leaves a one-sided doctrine; the motive of the suppression, doubtless, is that society does not often fail of its duties to the individual, whereas individuals frequently fail of their duties to society. This may be the fact generally, but not always. It is not the fact where there are bad laws and corrupt administration. It is not the fact where the restraints on liberty are greater than the exigencies of the State demand. It is not the fact, so long as there is a single vestige of persecution for opinions. To be thoroughly veracious, for example, in a society that restrains the discussion and expression of opinions, is more than such a society is ent.i.tled to.

[PLEASURES OF BENEVOLENCE CONDITIONAL.]

The same fallacy occurs in an allied theme,--the joys of Love and Benevolence. That love and benevolence are productive of great happiness is beyond question; but then the feeling must be mutual, it must be reciprocated. One-sided love or benevolence is a _virtue_, which is as much as to say it is _not_ a pleasure. The delights of benevolence are the delights of reciprocated benevolence; until reciprocated, in some form, the benevolent man has, strictly speaking, the sacrifice and nothing more. There is a great reluctance to encounter this simple naked truth; to state it in theory, at least, for it is fully admitted in practice. We fence it off by the a.s.sumption that benevolence will always have its reward somehow; that if the objects of it are ungrateful, others will make good the defect at last. Now these qualifications are very pertinent, very suitable to be urged after allowing the plain truth, that benevolence is intrinsically a sacrifice, a painful act; and that this act is redeemed, and far more than redeemed, by a fair reciprocity of benevolence. Only such an admission can keep us out of a mesh of contradictions. Like justice in itself, Benevolence in itself is painful; any virtue is pain in the first instance, although, when equally responded to, it brings a surplus of pleasure. There may be acts of a beneficent tendency that cost the performer nothing, or that even may chance to be agreeable; but these examples must not be given as the rule, or the type. It is the essence of virtuous acts, the prevailing character of the cla.s.s, to tax the agent, to deprive him of some satisfaction to himself; this is what we must start from; we are then in a position to explain how and when, and under what circ.u.mstances, and with what limitations, the virtuous man, whether his virtue be justice or benevolence, is from that cause a happy man.

It is a fallacy of the suppressed relative to describe virtue as determined by the _moral nature_ of G.o.d, as opposed to his arbitrary will. The essence of Morality is obedience to a superior, to a Law; where there is no superior there is nothing either moral or immoral. The supreme power is incapable of an immoral act. Parliament may do what is injurious, it cannot do what is illegal. So the Deity may be beneficent or maleficent, he cannot be moral or immoral.

Among the various ways, proposed in the seventeenth century, of solving the difficulty of the mutual action of the heterogeneous agencies--matter and mind--one was a mode of Divine interference, called the "Theory of Occasional Causes". According to this view, the Deity exerted himself by a _perpetual miracle_ to bring about the mental changes corresponding to the physical agents operating on our senses--light, sound, &c. Now in the mode of action suggested there is nothing self-contradictory; but in the use of the word "miracle" there is a mistake of relativity. The meaning of a miracle is an exceptional interference; it supposes an habitual state of things, from which it is a deviation. The very idea of miracle is abolished if every act is to be alike miraculous.

[MYSTERY CORRELATES WITH THE INTELLIGIBLE.]

We shall devote the remainder of this exposition to a still more notable cla.s.s of mistakes due to the suppression of a correlative member in a relative couple--those, namely, connected with the designation, "Mystery," a term greatly abused, in various ways, and especially by disregarding its relative character. Mystery supposes certain things that are plain, intelligible, knowable, revealed; and, by contrast to these, refers to certain other things that are obscure, unintelligible, unknowable, unrevealed. When a man's conduct is entirely plain, straightforward, or accounted for, we call that an intelligible case; when we are perplexed by the tortuosities of a crafty, double-dealing person, we say it is all very mysterious. So, in nature, we consider that we understand certain phenomena: such as gravity, and all its consequences, in the fall of bodies, the flow of rivers, the motions of the planets, the tides. On the other hand, earthquakes and volcanoes are very mysterious; we do not know what they depend upon, how or in what circ.u.mstances they are produced. Some of the operations of living bodies are understood,--as the heart's action in the mechanical propulsion of the blood; others, and the greater number, are mysterious, as the whole process of germination and growth. Now the existence of the contrast between things plainly understood, and things not understood, gives one distinct meaning to the term Mystery. In some cases, a mystery is formed by an apparent contradiction, as in the Theological mystery of Free-will and Divine Foreknowledge; here, too, there is a contrast with the great ma.s.s of consistent and reconcilable things. But now, when we are told by sensational writers, that _everything is mysterious;_ that the simplest phenomenon in nature--the fall of a stone, the swing of a pendulum, the continuance of a ball shot in the air--are wonderful, marvellous, miraculous, our understanding is confounded; there being then nothing plain at all, there is nothing mysterious. The wonderful rises from the common; as the lofty is lofty by relation to something lower: if there is nothing common, then there is nothing wonderful; if all phenomena are mysterious, nothing is mysterious; if we are to stand aghast in amazement because three times four is twelve, what phenomenon can we take as the type of the plain and the intelligible? You must always keep up a standard of the common, the easy, the comprehensible, if you are to regard other things as wonderful, difficult, inexplicable.

[LOCKE ON THE LIMITS OF THE UNDERSTANDING.]

The real character of a MYSTERY, and what const.i.tutes the Explanation of a fact, have been greatly misconceived. The changes of view on these points make up a chapter in the history of the education of the human mind. Perhaps the most decisive turning point was the publication of Locke's "Essay concerning Human Understanding," the motive of which, as stated in the homely and forcible language of the preface, was to ascertain what our understandings can do, what subjects they are fit to deal with, and where they should stop. I quote a few sentences:--

"If by this inquiry into the nature of the Understanding, I can discover the powers thereof; how far they reach; to what things they are in any degree proportionate; and where they fail us: I suppose it may be of use, to prevail with the busy mind of man to be more cautious in meddling with things exceeding its comprehension; to stop when it is at the utmost extent of its tether; and to sit down in a quiet ignorance of those things which, upon examination, are proved to be beyond the reach of our capacities." "The candle that is set up in us, shines bright enough for all our purposes. The discoveries we can make with this ought to satisfy us. And we shall then use our Understandings aright, when we entertain all objects in that way and proportion that they are suited to our faculties, and upon those grounds they are capable of being proposed to us." "It is of great use for the sailor to know the length of his line, though he cannot fathom with it all the depths of the ocean."

The course of physical science was preparing the same salutary lesson.

Locke's great contemporary and friend, Isaac Newton, was his fellow-worker in this tutorial undertaking; nor should Bacon be forgotten, although there is dispute as to the extent and character of his influence. The combined operation of these great leaders of thought was apparent in the altered views of scientific inquirers as to what is competent in research--what is the proper aim of inquiry. There arose a disposition to abandon the pursuit of mysterious essences and grand pervading unities, and ascertain with precision the facts and the laws of natural phenomena. The study of astronomy was inaugurated in Greenwich Observatory. The experiments of Priestley and of Franklin farther exemplified the eighteenth-century key to the secrets of the universe.

The lesson imparted by Newton and Locke and their successors still remains to be carried out and embodied in the subtler inquiries. The bearing upon what const.i.tutes a Mystery, and what const.i.tutes Explanation, or the accounting for appearances, may be expressed thus:--

In the first place, the Understanding can never pa.s.s out of its own experience--its acquired knowledge, whether of body or of mind. What we obtain by our various sensibilities to the world about us, and by our self-consciousness, are the foundation, the ABC of everything that we are capable of knowing. We know colours, and we know sound; we know pleasure and pain, and the various emotions of wonder, fear, love, anger. If there be any being endowed with senses different from ours, with that being we can have no communion. If there be any phenomena that escape our limited sensibilities, they transcend the possibility of our knowledge.

It is necessary, however, to take account of the combining or constructive apt.i.tudes of the mind. We can go a certain length in putting together our alphabet of sensation and experience into many various compounds. We can imagine a paradise or a pandemonium; but only as made up of our own knowledge of things good and evil. The limits of this constructive power are soon reached. We are baffled to enter into the feelings of our own kindred, when they are far removed in character and circ.u.mstances from ourselves. The youth at twenty cannot approximate to the feelings of men of middle age. The healthy are unable to comprehend the life of the invalid.

[TIME AND s.p.a.cE RELATIVE TO OUR FACULTIES.]

To come to the practical applications. The great leading notions called Time and s.p.a.ce are known to us only under the conditions of our own sensibility. Time is made known by all our actions, all our senses, all our feelings, and by the succession of our thoughts; it is experienced as a continuance and a repet.i.tion of movement, sight, sound, fear, or any other state of feeling, or of thinking. One motion or sensation is continued longer than another; or it is more frequently repeated after intermission, giving the _numerical_ estimate of time, as in the beats of the pendulum. In these ways we form estimates of seconds, minutes, hours, days. And our constructive faculty can be brought into play to conceive the larger tracts of duration--a century, or a hundred centuries. Nay, by our arithmetical powers we can put down in cipher, or conceive _symbolically_ (which is the meagrest of all conceptions) millions of millions of centuries; these being after all but compounds of our alphabet of enduring or repeated sensations and thoughts. We can suppose this arithmetical process to operate upon past duration or upon future duration, and there is no limit to the numbers that we can write down. But there is one thing that we cannot do; we cannot fix upon a point when Time or succession began, or upon a point when it will cease.

That is an operation not in keeping with our faculties; the very supposition is impracticable. We cannot entertain the notion of a state of things wherein the fact of continuance had no place; the effort belies itself. Time is inseparable from our mental nature; whatever we imagine, we must imagine as enduring. Some philosophers have supposed that we must be endowed by nature with the conception of Time, before we begin to exercise our senses; but the difficulty would be to deprive us of that adjunct without extinguishing our mental nature. Give us sensibility, and you cannot withhold the element of Time. The supposition of Kant and others, that it is implanted in us as an empty form, before we begin to employ our senses upon things, is needless; for as soon as we move, see, hear, think, are pleased or pained, we create time. And our notion of Time in general is exactly what these sensibilities make it, only enlarged by our constructive power already spoken of.

[MATTER AND VOID SUPPLEMENTARY.]

While all our senses and feelings give us time, it is our experience of Motion and Resistance,--the energetic or active side of our nature alone,--that gives us s.p.a.ce. The simplest feature of s.p.a.ce is the alternation of Resistance and Non-Resistance, of obstructed motion and freedom to move. The hand presses dead upon an obstacle; the obstacle gives way and allows free motion; these two contrasting experiences are the elements of the two contrasting facts--Matter and s.p.a.ce. By none of the five senses, in their pure and proper character as senses, can we obtain these experiences; and hence at an earlier stage of inquiry into the mind, when our knowledge-giving sensibilities were referred to the five senses, there was no adequate account of the notion of s.p.a.ce or Extension. s.p.a.ce includes more than this simple contrast of the resisting and the non-resisting; it includes what we call the Co-existing or Contemporaneous, the great aggregate of the outspread world, as existing at any moment, a somewhat complicated attainment, which I am not now specially concerned with. It sufficiently ill.u.s.trates the limitation of our knowledge by our sensibilities, from the nature of s.p.a.ce, to fasten attention on the double and mutually supplementing experience of Matter and Void; the one resisting movement, and giving the consciousness of resistance, or dead strain, the other permitting movement, and giving the consciousness of the un.o.bstructed sweep of the limbs or members. Whatever else may be in s.p.a.ce, this freedom to move, to soar, to expatiate (in contrast to being hemmed in, obstructed, held fast), is an essential part of the conception, and is formed out of our active or moving sensibilities. Now, as far as movement is concerned, we must be in one of two states;--we must be putting forth energy without effecting movement, being met by obstacles called matter; or we must be putting forth energy unresisted and effecting movement, which is what we mean by empty s.p.a.ce. There is no third position in the matter of putting forth our active energy. Where resistance ends and freedom begins, there is s.p.a.ce; where freedom ends, and obstruction begins, there is matter.

We find our sentient life to be made up, as regards movement, of a certain number and range of these two alternations; in other words, free s.p.a.ces and resisting barriers. And we can, by the constructive power already mentioned, imagine other proportions of the two experiences; we can imagine the scope for movement, the absence of obstruction, to be enlarged more and more, to be counted by thousands and millions of miles; but the only terminus or boundary that we can imagine is resistance, a dead obstacle. We are able to conceive the starry s.p.a.ces widened and prolonged from galaxy to galaxy through enormous strides of increasing amplitude, but when we try to think an end to this career, we can think only of a dead wall. There is no other end of s.p.a.ce within the grasp of our faculties; and that termination is not an end of extension; for we know that solid matter, viewed in other ways than as obstructing movement, has the same property of the extended belonging to the empty void. The inference is, that the limitation of our means of knowledge renders altogether incompetent the imagination of an end to either Time or s.p.a.ce. The greatest efforts of our combining faculty cannot exceed the elements presented to it, and these elements contain nothing that would set forth the situation of s.p.a.ce ending, and obstruction not beginning.

[ARE TIME AND s.p.a.cE INFINITE?]

Under these circ.u.mstances, it is an irrevelant enquiry, to ask, Are Time and s.p.a.ce finite or infinite? Many philosophers have put the question, and even answered it. They say Time has no beginning and no end, and s.p.a.ce has no boundaries; or, as otherwise expressed,--Time and s.p.a.ce are Infinite: an answer of such vagueness as to mean anything, from a harmless and proper a.s.sertion of the limits of our faculties, up to the verge of extravagance and self-contradiction.

When, in fact, people talk of the Infinite in Time and s.p.a.ce, they can point to one intelligible signification; as to the rest, this word is not a subject for scientific propositions, and the attempt at such can lead only to contradictions. The Infinite is a phrase most various in its purport: it is for the most part an emotional word, expressing human desire and aspiration; a word of poetry, imagination, and preaching, not a word to be discussed under science; no intellectual definition would exhibit its emotional force.

The second property of our intelligence is, that we can generalise many facts into one. Tracing agreement among the multifarious appearances of things, we can comprehend in one statement a vast number of details. The single law of gravity expresses the fall of a stone, the flow of rivers, the retention of the moon in her circuit round the earth. Now, this generalising sweep is a real advance in our knowledge, an ascent in the matter of intelligence, a step towards centralising the empire of science. What is more, this is the only real meaning of EXPLANATION.

A difficulty is solved, a mystery unriddled; when it can be shown to resemble something else; to be an example of a fact already known.

Mystery is isolation, exception, or, it may be, apparent contradiction; the resolution of the mystery is found in a.s.similation, ident.i.ty, fraternity. When all things are a.s.similated, so far as a.s.similation can go, so far as likeness holds, there is an end to explanation; there is an end to what the mind can do, or can intelligently desire.

[GRAVITY NOT A MYSTERY.]

Thus, when Gravity was generalised, by a.s.similating the terrestrial attraction seen in falling bodies with the celestial attraction of the sun and planets; and when, by fair presumption, the same power was extended to the remote stars; when, also, the _law_ was ascertained, so that the movements of the various bodies could be computed and predicted, there was nothing further to be done; explanation was exhausted. Unless we can find some other force to fraternise with gravity, so that the two might become a still more comprehensive unity, we must rest in gravity as the ultimatum of our faculties. There is no conceivable modification, or subst.i.tute, that would better our position.

Before Newton, it was a mystery what kept the moon and the planets in their places; the a.s.similation with falling bodies was the solution.

But, say many persons, is not gravity itself a mystery? We say No; gravity has pa.s.sed through all the stages of legitimate and possible explanation; it is the most highly generalised of all physical facts, and by no a.s.signable transformation could it be made more intelligible than it is. It is singularly easy of comprehension; its law is exactly known; and, excepting the details of calculation, in its more complex workings, there is nothing to complain of, nothing to rectify, nothing to pretend ignorance about; it is the very pattern, the model, the consummation of knowledge. The path of science, as exhibited in modern times, is towards generality, wider and wider, until we reach the highest, the widest laws of every department of things; there explanation is finished, mystery ends, perfect vision is gained.